Archive of Our Own

1.
It wasn't Ilya's first time in America, even though the Boston papers wrote about him like it was. He'd played tournaments here since he was sixteen, had done the draft and the combine and a development camp where men in polo shirts measured the length of his arms and asked him about his goals in slow, careful English. He knew that American hotels kept the ice machine at the end of the hall, and that the scrambled eggs at the free breakfast were never, under any circumstances, to be trusted. He knew that every rink on this continent smelled exactly the same, rubber mats and burnt popcorn and the cold bite of the ice, and that the smell was the one thing that made any of them feel like home.
But visiting a place and living in it turned out to be two very different things, and it was only once he'd unpacked his bags in the Lebedevs' basement that he started to understand how different.
His agent and the Bears had arranged it between them, the way it was apparently done with teenagers who had more money than sense and no valid driver's license. Konstantin Lebedev was a thirty-four-year-old defenceman from Yaroslavl who had been in the league for twelve years, long enough that his English had picked up a Boston accent and his Russian had started to sound faintly old-fashioned. He had a beard like a bird's nest, a minivan that smelled like juice boxes, and an American wife named Megan, a nurse, who asked Ilya how he was every morning over coffee and then, astonishingly, waited to hear the answer. Ilya didn't know yet how rare that was. He would learn.
"How are you, honey?" Megan asked on his first morning there, sliding a mug of coffee across the kitchen island.
"Tired," said Ilya. "The bed is too soft."
He waited for her to laugh, the way people did when he said things plainly. She only studied him over the rim of her own mug and nodded. "There's a firmer mattress in the guest room. Kostya can swap them tonight."
Kostya did, grumbling the whole time in Russian about his back, and Ilya slept better than he had in weeks. It was the first sign he had that the question meant different things in different mouths.

The trouble was that everyone asked.
The cashier at the grocery store asked first. She was his age, with glitter on her eyelids and a name tag that said KAYLA, and she beamed at him like they were old friends.
"Hi! How are you?"
"Suspicious," said Ilya, and set three loaves of bread on the belt. "Every bread in this store is sweet. Is cake, pretending."
"Awesome!" She scanned the first loaf. "Do you have a rewards card?"
He stared at her. She stared back, bright and patient, waiting for the card.
"No," he said slowly.
"Have a great day!"
After that, he started noticing it everywhere.
At the pharmacy, the woman behind the counter smiled at him over her reading glasses. "How are you today, sweetie?"
Ilya put a bottle of cough syrup on the counter between them and looked at her. "Sick," he said. "I am at pharmacy."
She laughed, delighted, like he'd told a joke, and rang him up still chuckling. He walked back out into the cold without the faintest idea what had been funny.
A week later, at a steakhouse in Pittsburgh after a win, the waiter swept up to their table with a notepad and a wide white smile. "How are we doing tonight, gentlemen?"
"Hungry," said Ilya, since nobody else was answering. "And my shoulder hurts. Somebody hit me in the second period."
The waiter blinked at him. "Great!" he said. "Can I start you guys off with some drinks?"
Across the table, two of his teammates were shaking with silent laughter into their menus. Ilya ordered a steak and decided not to ask.
The worst was a Saturday morning at the rink where the Lebedevs' son had learn-to-skate, the parents lined up along the boards with their coffees, watching a dozen six-year-olds fall over in slow motion. The dad beside him nodded a greeting. "How's it going, bud?"
"My knee hurts," said Ilya.
"Oh." The man's smile froze. "Ha. Yeah. Tough." And then he shuffled two feet down the boards, like bad knees were catching, and stared very hard at the ice for the rest of the lesson.
Even the man who sold him his car asked, and it turned out he did not want to hear that Ilya found his tie upsetting either.
Ilya did not think of himself as someone who talked too much. Most of the time his answers were one word, maybe two (tired, hungry, fine, bad), partly because that was his nature, and partly because English still sat in his mouth like a borrowed mouthguard, workable but never quite the right shape. It wasn't as if he was pouring his heart out to strangers in the frozen food aisle. He was only answering the question they'd asked.
And yet every time, there was that same flicker on their faces, a kind of polite alarm, like he'd picked up the phone when they had only meant to leave a message.
For a while, he assumed it was his English. Maybe suspicious meant something different here, or sick had some second meaning nobody had warned him about. So he started paying closer attention, the way he'd once studied game tape, watching how the veterans handled it in hotel lobbies and at the rink doors, and slowly he began to notice a pattern. Someone would say how are you, and the other person would say good, and neither of them would even slow down. Nobody ever said tired. Nobody ever mentioned their knee. Either every single person in Boston felt wonderful at all times, which seemed statistically unlikely, or something else was going on.
By the end of October, he'd worked out that he was the one getting it wrong. It took him until the middle of November to decide that he didn't much care.

It was Kostya who finally explained it, on the drive to practice one gray morning. Kostya refused to speak Russian to him in the car, on the principle that Ilya needed the practice more than he needed the comfort, so they argued in English, slowly, over the sports radio. Cliff Marlow had apparently been telling the whole locker room that Ilya had informed his wife her dress looked like a curtain, and Kostya wanted to hear Ilya's side of the story.
"She asked me how I was," Ilya said. "Then how she looked."
Kostya sighed like a man settling in for a long conversation. "Okay. So. I will tell you something I wish somebody told me."
The thing, as it turned out, was that how are you wasn't a question at all. It was a greeting dressed up as a question, the way the bread had been dressed up as bread, and the correct response was good, you? regardless of whether you were good, or whether you had any interest in the other person's answer, which you didn't. Everybody said good. Everybody kept walking. Nobody got hurt.
"My first Thanksgiving here," Kostya added, "Megan's mother asked me how I was. I told her about my groin injury. In detail. She still talks about it, twelve years later."
"So everyone lies," Ilya said, when Kostya had finished.
"Nobody's lying. It's manners."
"Is lying, with manners."
Kostya laughed and didn't argue, which Ilya chose to count as a win, and turned the radio back up.
Ilya thought about it for the rest of the drive, and through warmups, and on and off for weeks after. He could do it, obviously. It would be the easiest thing in the world. Good, you? Three syllables, and nobody would ever edge away from him along the boards again, and he'd fit a little more neatly into a country he was going to be living in for a very long time.
Besides, where he came from, nobody was ever good. You were normal, at best, and if things were genuinely going well, you kept your mouth shut about it so you didn't jinx anything. The rest of the time you complained: about the weather, about the traffic, about your back, about the price of cucumbers, about your neighbor's dog and your mother-in-law. About almost everything, in fact, except the people actually in charge, which was something you learned very young to keep to yourself. Then the other person complained back, and that was the whole point of the conversation. Complaining was how you knew you were talking to a real person. A man who answered good, good, good all day long was either lying to you or trying to sell you something, and Ilya had no intention of becoming either.
So he kept answering. It was principle, mostly. And partly, if he was honest (which was, after all, the entire point), it was spite.

His teammates, meanwhile, had decided that this was the best thing that had ever happened to them. Hockey players, Ilya had discovered, were a lot like dogs: they didn't understand very much, but whatever they did understand, they understood completely.
"Roz," Cliff called across the locker room one morning, loud enough for everyone to hear. "How are you?"
"Hungover," said Ilya, without looking up from his skates. "You were there."
The room erupted. Cliff looked like a man who had just been handed a new toy. "Okay, okay. How are you feeling about tonight?"
"Good. I will score."
"You hear that, boys? The oracle has spoken."
Ilya scored in the second period. After that, Cliff asked him before every single game, and nobody on the Bears was ever allowed to forget it.
The reporters were another matter entirely.
It was a bad night in Philadelphia, a four-to-one loss that had felt worse than the score, and Ilya had been on the ice for two of the goals against. He was still sitting in his stall in his base layer, hair dripping, when the reporters came in, and one of them, a young guy with a local station's logo on his microphone, worked his way over and held it under Ilya's chin.
"Ilya, how are you feeling about tonight's performance?"
Ilya looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the microphone.
"Bad," he said. "We lost."
The reporter waited, microphone still out, clearly expecting the rest of it: the part about battling hard, and moving on, and getting back to work tomorrow. Ilya had heard the other guys say it a hundred times. He did not say it. That was the answer, and there wasn't any more of it.
By the time the team landed in Boston, the clip was everywhere. The Bears' media relations coordinator caught him outside the weight room the next morning with her phone in her hand and an expression that was trying very hard to be stern.
"So," she said. "We should maybe talk about media training."
"He asked how I feel," said Ilya. "I told him."
She opened her mouth, closed it again, and then, to his surprise, started laughing. Somebody on the radio had called him refreshing, she told him, and somebody else had called him rude. Ilya said they were probably both right, which only made her laugh harder, and she made him promise to at least try adding one more sentence next time.

He had known Shane Hollander for three years before Hollander ever asked him how he was.
Known was maybe the wrong word. They had been circling each other since they were sixteen, at tournaments and showcases and every junior event where some official got the bright idea to stand the Russian kid next to the Canadian kid and see what happened. They'd traded goals and elbows and one truly spectacular series of glares across a faceoff circle in Buffalo. At the World Juniors, Hollander had shaken his hand in the line and said good game in a tone that meant something closer to I hope you step on a Lego in the dark, and Ilya had said I know, just to watch his jaw tighten. They knew each other on the ice, and since that summer they'd known each other in hotel rooms with the curtains shut, too. But they didn't talk, not really, not in either place.
The All-Star break changed that, a little. There was a media event in a hotel ballroom, all sponsor banners and folding tables and bad coffee, and a league handler steered Hollander across the room like a tugboat nudging a barge, because Montreal's golden boy and Boston's Russian made a nice picture together and everybody in the league knew it. Hollander held out his hand like he'd practiced the motion in a mirror. His hair was very neat. His eyebrows were very serious.
"Rozanov," he said. "How are you?"
It came out of him exactly the way it came out of cashiers, pleasant and automatic, with good, you? already waiting in line behind it. And maybe it was the bad coffee, or the eight pillows on his hotel bed, or the fact that Hollander was so obviously expecting the easy answer, but Ilya found he didn't want to give it to him.
"Bored," he said, and held on to Hollander's hand a beat too long. "And the pillows here are terrible. Eight on one bed, for what?" He let go. "But now you are here, so, less boring. How are you, Hollander?"
He waited for the flicker. He had seen it a hundred times by then, that polite alarm, the look of someone searching for the nearest exit.
It didn't come. Instead Hollander frowned at him, not unkindly, more as if the pillows were a genuine problem that deserved genuine thought.
"They're awful," he said. "I brought my own."
It took Ilya a second to process this. "You travel with pillow."
"It's for my neck." Hollander's ears were going pink, which was deeply satisfying. "Lots of guys do it."
"No," said Ilya, with enormous delight. "They do not."
Hollander's jaw set in the stubborn line Ilya knew from a hundred faceoffs, and for a moment Ilya was sure that was the end of it, that he'd get a stiff nod and watch Hollander make his escape toward the cameras. Instead Hollander glanced over his shoulder at the handler, who had been waylaid by somebody's agent, and then looked back at Ilya and lowered his voice.
"You want to know how I am? Annoyed. They've dragged me over here four times today to stand next to you for pictures, and you keep doing that thing with your face."
"What thing?"
"That. The thing you're doing right now."
Ilya, who was grinning, did not stop doing it. "So you are annoyed," he said, "and you have a special pillow."
"I'm not—" Hollander broke off, looking like a man who regretted every decision that had brought him to this spot on the carpet, and then, to Ilya's genuine astonishment, huffed out something that was very nearly a laugh. "Fine. Yes. Annoyed, and I have a special pillow. Happy?"
"Very," said Ilya, and found that he meant it.
Then the handler was back, towing Hollander off toward a camera crew, and Ilya watched him go, stiff-shouldered and scowling, and caught himself still thinking about it hours later, long after the event had finished and he was lying in his hotel room glaring at the eight pillows.
It was such a small thing. But Hollander had asked the fake question, the way everybody did, and then he'd listened to the real answer, even the stupid part about the pillows, and then, grudgingly and irritably, he had given a real one back. In five months on this continent, plenty of people had asked him how he was, and one or two, like Megan, had even listened. Nobody had ever answered back. Ilya decided, very firmly, that it didn't mean anything, and then couldn't stop turning it over in his head.

The strange thing was that it became theirs after that, though neither of them ever said so.
The rest of it kept happening too, whenever Boston played in Montreal or Montreal played in Boston, and once a year at the All-Star weekend, until it had become something they simply did without ever saying out loud what it was. And the more of it there was, the less they were allowed to say to each other in public. They couldn't smile at each other across the ice. They couldn't linger in the handshake line, or sit together at league dinners, or be caught looking for too long. Every word they exchanged in front of a camera was a word someone might replay later, looking for something, and Hollander, who worried about everything, worried about that most of all.
But how are you was safe. Nobody listened to how are you; it was the most invisible sentence in the English language, Kostya had taught him that much. So Hollander started saying it at the end of handshake lines, and in hallways outside media scrums, and in the crush of bodies at league events, and nearly every time, Ilya told him the truth in one word.
The first time he did it, Ilya almost missed it. It was a regular-season game in Boston, the hallway outside the dressing rooms crowded with staff and cameras, and Hollander walked past him without slowing down and said, "Rozanov. How are you?" in the same flat, polite voice he used on sponsors. Ilya said "Good," out of pure reflex, and Hollander nodded and kept walking.
It wasn't until he was standing in the shower afterwards that Ilya realized what had happened. It was the first time in months they'd spoken to each other in public without either of them sounding like they were about to start a fight. It was also, he thought, the first time Hollander had ever asked him that question already knowing he'd get the truth.
Tired. Good. Angry, after the game where Hollander scored twice on him. Hollander would nod, polite as a stranger, and walk away, and that night or the next, somewhere with the curtains closed, he would ask again, and wait.
The only time Ilya ever lied to him was in February, in the corridor under the Bell Centre, with reporters clustered outside the Montreal dressing room thirty feet away. Hollander passed him with a towel around his neck and his hair still wet from the shower, and barely slowed down.
"Rozanov," he said. "How are you?"
Ilya had spent the entire game not thinking about the phone call from Moscow that morning. He had mostly succeeded, and he had no intention of stopping now, least of all in a hallway full of cameras.
"Fine," he said.
It came out as easily as it came out of everyone else on this continent, and he had already started to walk on when he realized Hollander had stopped.
It was only for a second, and his face hardly changed, but Ilya saw it anyway. Not the polite alarm he'd grown used to from strangers, but something much closer to worry. Hollander had heard him say bored and hungover and tired and angry in a hundred hallways by then. He had never once heard him say fine.
"Yeah?" Hollander said quietly.
"Yes," said Ilya, and held his gaze, daring him to push.
Down the hall, someone called Hollander's name. He glanced toward the cameras and then back at Ilya, his jaw tight with everything he couldn't say out loud in a hallway in Montreal.
"Okay," he said. "Later, then."
It wasn't a question either. Ilya found, to his own irritation, that he didn't mind.
It was the most private conversation Ilya had ever had, and they'd held most of it in front of twenty thousand people.

In Ilya's hotel room in Montreal, the night after a game whose score neither of them would remember, years into something they still didn't have a name for, Shane rolled onto his side and looked at him.
"Hey," he said. "How are you?"
Ilya huffed into the pillow, which was, of course, too soft. Shane's own pillow was on the other side of the bed, because some things about Shane Hollander were never going to change, and Ilya had long since stopped wanting them to.
"Terrible," he said, with feeling.
And then, because Shane had asked, he told him. The pillow was a cloud, a damp and useless cloud. Their flight had sat on the tarmac for two hours while a man behind him explained cryptocurrency to his seatmate. His coach had taken him off the first power-play unit for the entire third period, to teach him some kind of lesson, as though Ilya were a child, which was insanity, which was a crime, which should be reported to someone. The referee in the second period had clearly been paid off by somebody, possibly the cryptocurrency man. The room service burger had been gray. He complained for a good five minutes, thoroughly and with real artistry, lying on his back with one arm flung over his eyes, and then, somewhere between the burger and the water pressure in the shower, something else slipped out.
"And my brother called this morning." He said it to the ceiling, in exactly the same tone as the burger. "He needs money again. He always needs money again. And when I asked about my father, he said, why do you care." A pause. "So. That also."
It was out before he could stop it, and he felt it land in the room, heavier than everything else he'd said put together. He kept his arm over his eyes. He waited for Shane to make it into a big thing, to sit up, to start asking questions Ilya had no intention of answering.
Shane didn't. He was quiet for a moment, and then Ilya felt Shane's hand find his on top of the sheets and stay there, not holding hard, just there. He didn't say anything about the brother. He didn't say anything about the father. After a while, he said, very seriously:
"The burger here is always terrible. I had it last year. And that ref called a phantom hook on me in the second, too. And my coach benched me for a whole shift last month for body language, so I know exactly how you feel about the power play. It's a crime."
Ilya lifted his arm off his face and stared at him.
"You are complaining," he said.
"You started it."
"No, this is correct." Ilya propped himself up on one elbow, genuinely delighted. "This is how you answer. Somebody complains, you complain back. You understand."
"I've been paying attention," said Shane, a little pink, and Ilya laughed and pulled him down by the back of the neck and kissed him, and for a while nobody complained about anything.
It would be years yet before Ilya told him the rest of it. Before the phone calls from Moscow, and the heavy, shapeless things that sat underneath them, stopped being something that slipped out by accident between complaints about a burger and became something he could say on purpose, out loud, to one person. That kind of honesty took him a long, long time. But Shane's hand stayed on his for the rest of the night, and Shane never once mentioned the brother, and lying there in a bad hotel bed while Shane Hollander solemnly agreed that the burger had been a war crime, it felt, absurdly, a little bit like being home.
Out of everyone on this entire continent who had ever asked Ilya Rozanov how he was, only one had ever complained back.
Of course it was Hollander. It was very annoying.
Ilya didn't mind at all.

2.
Shane had known about Ilya and his hair for years before it ever became his problem.
Not that he'd paid it much attention. It was one of those small things you picked up about a person after a decade of watching them more closely than you'd ever admit: the way Ilya chewed on the end of his mouthguard during TV timeouts, the way he always stepped onto the ice left skate first, and the way that after every game, while every other guy in the league pulled a hoodie over wet hair and walked out to the bus, Ilya sat down in front of a mirror and dried his. No fuss, no ceremony. Just a cheap hairdryer and five minutes, and then a beanie pulled down over his ears if it was winter.
Shane had noticed it at an All-Star weekend years ago, when they'd been put on the same team for once and shared a locker room, and he'd filed it under things he wasn't supposed to be thinking about, which was a very crowded category back then. Lots of guys had routines. Shane ate the same pregame meal down to the gram and had once driven forty minutes back to his apartment because he'd forgotten his own pillow. He was in no position to judge anybody for a hairdryer.
It didn't occur to him that it might have anything to do with him until their first real winter together.

It was Christmas. Thanks to a rare and merciful quirk of the schedule, the Voyageurs didn't play again until the twenty-ninth, which meant nearly a week with nowhere to be. Shane had spent Christmas Eve and most of Christmas Day at his parents' house on the other side of Ottawa, eaten far too much of his mother's cooking, and then made vague noises about seeing a friend and driven across town to Ilya's. On the first morning he woke up early, checked the temperature on his phone out of habit (minus twenty-three), thought well, that's cold, and got in the shower anyway. Anya had been giving him meaningful looks since six.
To Shane's surprise, Ilya was already up when he came downstairs, which on a day off almost never happened before nine. But there he was at the kitchen island in sweatpants and a T-shirt with a hole in the collar, hair flattened on one side, scrolling through his phone while Anya leaned adoringly against his shins. He mumbled good morning without looking up. Then Shane took his coat and Anya's leash off the hook, and Anya went berserk with joy, and Ilya did look up, and his gaze snagged somewhere around Shane's head and stayed there.
"You're going out?"
"Just taking Anya around the block. Go back to bed."
Ilya put his phone down. "Like that?"
Shane glanced down at himself. Jeans, sweater, coat. "Like what?"
"Your hair is wet."
"It's damp. It's a five-minute walk."
"Shane." Ilya said it the way he said things when he thought Shane was being deliberately stupid, which always came out more fond than it probably should have. "Is minus twenty-three."
"I know. I checked."
"So you know is minus twenty-three, and still you go outside with wet head." Ilya shook his head slowly, with the deep, weary disappointment of a man watching a teammate take a stupid penalty in overtime. "This is worse. Before, you were just an idiot. Now you are informed idiot." He pointed his phone at Anya, who was spinning in circles by the door. "She has fur. Is different. You have..." A vague, contemptuous gesture at Shane's head. "That. You will get sick."
Shane laughed; he couldn't help it. "That's not how it works. You don't get sick from being cold. You get sick from viruses."
"My mother said it every winter," said Ilya. "Every morning before school, she put her hand on my head to check. If it was wet, I did not go out." He shrugged, a little self-conscious, like that had been more than he'd meant to say. "So I dry my hair."
"Is that why you do it after every game?"
"Is why I do it always." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Guys on the team say I am like an old grandmother. Every season, same jokes. And every February, half of them are sick, coughing all over the bus, and who is healthy?" He spread his hands modestly. "The grandmother."
It was, Shane had to admit, a compelling anecdote. It was also not science.
"I love you," he said, "but you're full of shit."
Ilya didn't argue. He raised one eyebrow, very slowly, and picked his phone back up. "Okay. Is your head." A pause, perfectly timed. "I will remember you said this."
Shane took Anya around the block anyway, out of principle. It was the kind of cold that hurt to breathe, the snow squeaking under his boots and the sky that hard, brilliant blue that Ottawa only managed on the very coldest days. His hair froze about halfway down the street, into stiff little spikes that crackled when he touched them. The tips of his ears burned and then went numb, which was worse. Anya, who had a thick double coat and no opinions about anything except squirrels, had the time of her life, and Shane stood patiently at every snowbank while she investigated it with enormous thoroughness, and absolutely refused to acknowledge that the back of his skull had started to ache. By the time they got home, his whole scalp was throbbing. Ilya was still at the island, now with a cup of coffee in front of him. He looked at Shane's hair, frosted white at the tips like a Christmas decoration, and he said nothing at all.
Somehow, that was worse.

The next morning, Shane woke up with a scratchy throat and decided, very firmly, that it was the dry air in Ilya's house.
By the afternoon he had a headache. By dinner every joint in his body ached, and he'd given up pretending, and he went looking for a thermometer in Ilya's bathroom cabinet.
He found one in a little plastic case, and when he opened it, he stared. It was glass: a thin glass tube with a silver line inside and tiny numbers printed along its length. He wasn't sure he'd seen one since he was a little kid.
"Ilya," he called. "Is this a mercury thermometer?"
Ilya appeared in the doorway and took in the whole picture at once: Shane on the edge of the bathtub, flushed and miserable, holding the glass tube up to the light. Something complicated happened on his face. Concern, mostly, and underneath it a very small, very smug I told you so that he was clearly trying to swallow and not quite managing.
"Is the best kind," he said.
"You can't even buy these here anymore. I'm pretty sure they're banned. Where did you get it?"
"Russian store. The lady at the register keeps them under the counter." Ilya came in and took it from him. "Digital ones lie."
"Digital ones don't lie. And if that breaks, this whole bathroom is a hazmat situation."
"So don't break it." Ilya shook it down with three sharp flicks of his wrist, like he'd done it a thousand times, and handed it back. "Under your arm. Ten minutes."
"Ten minutes?"
"Is accurate."
Shane sat on the edge of the tub for ten minutes with a glass tube of poison clamped under his armpit, feeling like a sick child in a very old novel, while Ilya leaned against the doorframe and kept him company. When the time was up, Ilya took the thermometer, turned it slowly in the light, and squinted.
"Thirty-eight and six."
Shane stared at the little silver line, and his brain started doing math without being asked. Practice was in three days. The game against Philadelphia was in four. He was halfway through a strength block he'd been planning since September, and he had a meal plan, and he could not, under any circumstances, be sick for any of it.
Shane closed his eyes. "Please don't."
"I did not say anything."
"You're thinking it really loudly."
To his credit, Ilya didn't say it. He laid his palm against Shane's forehead instead, cool and dry, and left it there a little longer than he needed to, and the smugness drained out of his face all at once, replaced by something softer and much more focused.
"Okay," he said. "Bed. Now."
"I need to call our team doctor. And my trainer. I have to figure out what this means for practice, and whether I should even be on the ice on the twenty-eighth, and if I miss the game—"
"You can call from bed."
"Ilya, I'm serious."
"So am I." Ilya took the thermometer from him, put it back in its case with great care, and steered him out of the bathroom by the shoulders. "Bed. Then you call your doctor. Then you do what I say."

Shane had a plan for being sick. He'd had the same one since juniors: fluids, electrolytes, something for the fever, as much sleep as he could get, a call to the team doctor, and plain chicken and rice until his appetite came back. It was a good plan, sensible and evidence-based, and when he called the Voyageurs' doctor from Ilya's bed and got exactly the advice he'd expected, he hung up feeling a little better just for having it confirmed.
Ilya also had a plan. It became clear fairly quickly that Shane's opinion of it was not going to be consulted.
It started with the windows. Shane hadn't even noticed the bedroom window was open a crack until Ilya shut it with a firm little thump, checked the other one, and went off down the hall, and Shane lay there listening to him go through the whole house room by room, sealing it up like a submarine. Then came the socks, thick and scratchy and hand-knit in a truly alarming orange zigzag, which Ilya pulled onto Shane's feet himself when Shane was too slow about it.
"Where do you even get these?"
"Same store. Same lady." The second sock went on with a decisive tug. "Feet must be warm. Cold feet, you stay sick longer."
Shane opened his mouth to point out that the temperature of his feet had nothing whatsoever to do with his immune system, and then closed it again. He didn't have the energy. Also, the socks were extremely warm.
Ilya disappeared downstairs after that and came back twenty minutes later with a mug. It was hot milk, with a pale golden slick of melted butter across the top and honey dissolving somewhere underneath, and when Shane lifted it toward his face, a smell rose up that was sweet and rich and unmistakably, aggressively garlicky.
"What is in this?"
"Milk. Honey. Butter." A tiny pause. "And one clove of garlic. Crushed."
"Garlic? In milk? With butter?" Shane stared up at him. "Ilya, what the hell are you doing?"
"Making you better." Ilya sat down on the edge of the bed with the patient, immovable look of a man prepared to wait all night if he had to. "Drink while it's hot."
Every nutritional instinct Shane possessed was screaming at him. But his throat felt like it had been sandpapered, and the mug was warm between his hands, and Ilya clearly wasn't going anywhere. So Shane drank it. It was awful, and at the same time strangely, deeply soothing, heavy and sweet and sharp all at once, and the warmth went all the way down his raw throat and spread out through his chest like a hand pressed flat against it.
"That was disgusting," he said, handing back the empty mug.
"I know." Ilya looked satisfied. "My mother made it the same way. I also hated it."

The fever got worse in the night.
Shane woke sometime after two, burning up and shivering at the same time, the sheets twisted around his legs and his head full of strange, sliding half-dreams. He didn't remember making any noise. But the bedside lamp was on, turned down low, and Ilya was already sitting up against the headboard with a bowl of water in his lap. When he wrung out a cloth and laid it across Shane's forehead, it was cool rather than cold, and it smelled sharp and sour.
"What is that?" Shane mumbled.
"Vinegar. A little bit, in the water." Ilya dipped the cloth again. "It takes the heat out."
"Smells like salad."
"So you are a salad. Lie still."
Shane was too hot and too miserable to argue. Ilya wiped his wrists with the cloth, and the insides of his elbows, and the back of his neck, slowly and methodically, and then dipped it and laid it across his forehead again and started over. Every time the cloth grew warm, he changed it. He didn't say much. Once he murmured something in Russian that Shane didn't catch, and once he smoothed Shane's damp hair back from his face and left his hand there for a long time. Shane drifted in and out, and every time he surfaced, Ilya was still awake, still sitting up in the lamplight with the bowl in his lap, watching him.
Near dawn, the fever finally dipped. Ilya went downstairs and came back with a cup of tea, pale gold and faintly floral, with a heaped spoonful of raspberry jam stirred into it.
"What's this one?"
"Lipa. Linden flowers." Ilya held the cup steady while Shane took the first sip. "For sweating. You drink, then blankets."
Shane drank the whole thing, and then lay under three blankets as ordered, and sweated, and slept until almost noon.

His nose had closed up completely by the time he woke, and that was when the potatoes came out.
Ilya carried a steaming pot in from the kitchen with oven mitts and set it on the coffee table in front of the couch. Inside, still in their skins, were a dozen boiled potatoes.
"I'm really not hungry," said Shane.
"Is not for eating." Ilya shook out a bath towel and dropped it over Shane's head, tenting it over the pot, so that the whole world narrowed to hot, damp, starchy darkness. "Breathe."
"Are you serious?"
"Deep. Through your mouth first, then your nose."
Shane sat under the towel breathing potato steam and wondered how exactly his life had come to this. He was the captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. He had been on the cover of magazines.
"Is this what people in Russia do," he said, muffled, "instead of buying a decongestant?"
"Is what people do everywhere," said Ilya's voice from somewhere outside the towel. "Except here, apparently."
"I feel like I'm being boiled."
"You are being cured."
The worst part was that after ten minutes, his nose actually cleared. Shane did not mention this. He came out from under the towel red-faced and damp, and a few minutes later he heard Ilya in the kitchen mashing the potatoes with butter and dill, and then the unmistakable sound of someone eating them straight out of the pot.
"You're eating those?" Shane called, appalled. "Those are my sick potatoes!"
"The germs are in you," Ilya called back, with his mouth full. "Not in the potatoes. Otherwise is a waste of food."

That evening, there was a foot bath.
Ilya filled a basin with water as hot as the tap would go and stirred in a spoonful of mustard powder from a yellow tin with Cyrillic lettering on it, and Shane sat on the edge of the bathtub, too tired to argue anymore, and let him roll his pajama pants up to the knee. The water stung, then burned, then settled into a deep, spreading warmth that crept up his shins and seemed to loosen every knot in his body.
Ilya stayed kneeling on the tiles. He tested the water with the inside of his wrist, frowned, and added more from the kettle, stirring it with his hand so it wouldn't scald. His hair kept falling into his eyes, and there was a yellow smudge of mustard on his thumb, and Shane watched him and felt his chest go tight for reasons that had nothing to do with his lungs. Ilya could be so careless about so many things: his own shoulder, which he'd been playing through for weeks without telling anyone, his own sleep, his own heart, sometimes, in ways that frightened Shane more than he had ever admitted out loud. And here he was on his knees on a cold bathroom floor, after a night without sleep, fussing over the temperature of a basin of mustard water as though it were the most important job he'd have all week.
"Your mom did this too?" Shane asked quietly.
Ilya nodded without looking up. "Every time I was sick. She sat on the floor like this and told me stories until the water went cold." He added a little more from the kettle and stirred it in. "She always said I make it too cold. She liked it very hot. I was always complaining."
Shane reached down and pushed Ilya's hair back off his forehead, and Ilya leaned into his hand for a moment, and neither of them said anything for a long time after that.
Afterwards there was more linden tea, and three blankets, and strict orders to sweat. Ilya climbed into bed beside him despite Shane's warnings about catching it, and Anya climbed onto both their feet, and Shane fell asleep too hot and too heavy and more comfortable than he had been in days.

He woke up soaked through, and his head was clear.
His throat was only a little sore. He could breathe through both sides of his nose. He lay there in the gray morning light for a long moment, trying to decide how he felt about that, and then went downstairs.
Ilya was at the counter with his coffee, the mercury thermometer lying in its case beside his mug like a trophy. He shook it down and held it out without a word. Shane took it, sat on a stool, and dutifully tucked it under his arm while Ilya made toast.
"Thirty-six and seven," Ilya announced, ten minutes later, squinting at it.
"It would have broken anyway," Shane said at once. "That's just how viruses work. Three to five days, that's the normal course. It has nothing to do with the potatoes."
"Of course," said Ilya pleasantly. "Nothing to do with potatoes."
"Or the garlic milk."
"Or the milk."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." Ilya set a plate of toast in front of him, and then, very casually, a mug of tea with raspberry jam already stirred in. He didn't say I told you so. He didn't have to. The eyebrow said it for him, and so did the corner of his mouth, and Shane put his face in his hands and laughed until he started coughing again.
He drove back to Montreal that afternoon with a thermos of linden tea on the passenger seat, which Ilya had pressed into his hands at the door along with strict instructions about scarves, and two days later he skated a full practice without so much as a sniffle. The team doctor called it a remarkably quick recovery. Shane agreed that it was, and did not mention the potatoes.

Back in Montreal the next week, Shane came out of the shower after practice, pulled on his hoodie, and got as far as the locker room door before he stopped.
Outside it was minus eighteen. Water was dripping from his hair onto his collar.
He stood there for a second. Then he turned around, went back to his stall, and asked one of the equipment guys whether there was a hairdryer anywhere in the building.
Hayden, two stalls down, looked up from his phone. "Since when do you dry your hair?"
"Since now."
"Did you have, like, a near-death experience or something?"
"Something like that," said Shane.
He didn't elaborate. He could hardly explain that he'd been cured by a man with a mercury thermometer and a pot of potatoes. He just stood at the mirror and dried his hair, all the way, while Hayden watched him with deep suspicion.
By the end of the month he'd bought his own. It lived in his bag right next to his pillow, and he never left a rink with wet hair again.

3.
Shane woke at a quarter past six on a Sunday in March to an empty bed and the sound of the front door opening and closing downstairs, again and again, as if someone were moving house in the dark.
It was his first free weekend in Ottawa in nearly a month. The Voyageurs had played on Friday and wouldn't play again until Tuesday, and he'd driven down late the night before with every intention of sleeping until eight, which by his standards was practically decadent. Ilya, who considered any hour before nine a personal insult, should have been dead to the world beside him. Instead there was a cold dent in the pillow, Anya barking happily somewhere below, and the door going again.
The front hall, when Shane made it downstairs, was full of flowers. Not a vase or two, but genuinely full: tulips in paper and cellophane propped along the walls and lined up on the stairs, red and pink and white and yellow, dozens of them, with more stacked on the bench by the door and a bucket of something yellow and fluffy that Shane didn't recognize at all. The whole house smelled green and cold, like a greenhouse in winter. Ilya came in with another armful and snow in his hair, and stopped short when he saw Shane on the stairs, looking faintly put out, like someone caught wrapping presents.
"You're awake," he said. "Is too early. Go back to sleep."
"Ilya." Shane looked around the hall. "What is all this?"
"Flowers."
"I can see that they're flowers."
Ilya set his armful down on the bench and stamped the snow off his boots. "Today is March eighth."
He seemed to feel this covered it. He'd already turned away to count the bouquets lined up along the wall, lips moving silently in Russian, and Shane had to follow him down the hall to get the rest of the explanation.
"Okay. And what happens on March eighth?"
Ilya looked at him the way he might have looked at someone asking what happened on December twenty-fifth. "Women's Day."
"International Women's Day? I mean, I know it exists. I've seen the posts. I just didn't know you—" Shane gestured at the stairs, the bench, the bucket of yellow fluff. "Did the florist give you a bulk discount?"
"She opened early for me," said Ilya, which was not an answer, and went back out to the car for more.

Shane put on his boots and helped, since there was clearly no stopping this and he might as well be useful.
There were forty-three bouquets in total. Ilya had them written down on the back of an envelope in his cramped, slanting handwriting, the colors of the tulips noted next to each name, and Shane read it over his shoulder while they loaded the trunk. He recognized a few of the names from Ilya's stories about the Centaurs, the head athletic therapist, the woman who ran the media department, someone called Denise from the kitchen, but most of them meant nothing to him.
"Is everyone," Ilya said, when Shane asked. "Every woman who works in the building."
"Every woman?"
"Da. Is not so many. Hockey is mostly men, you know this."
Forty-three seemed like quite a lot to Shane, but he didn't get the chance to say so, because Ilya had stopped halfway through loading the trunk and was frowning down at a bouquet of pink tulips. He counted the stems with one finger. Then he pulled one out and laid it on the roof of the car.
"What are you doing?"
"There were ten."
"And that's...bad?"
"Even number is for funerals," said Ilya, tucking the paper back around the other nine. "For the dead. Living people, you give odd."
Shane stared at him. "Is that a real rule?"
"Very real."
"I've given people even numbers of flowers. I gave my mom a dozen roses for her birthday once."
Ilya paused and looked at him with such deep, gentle sympathy that Shane felt as though he'd just confessed to a crime committed in perfect innocence. "Is okay," he said kindly. "You didn't know."
He went through every single bouquet after that, counting. By the time the trunk was shut, there was a small, sad pile of orphaned tulips on the roof of the car, and Ilya gathered them up and dropped them on the passenger seat without a word.

The Centaurs had an optional morning skate that Ilya never went to, except that today he was going, and it became clear, as Ilya shut the trunk and looked at him with great expectation, that he thought Shane was going too.
"No," said Shane.
"I did not say anything."
"You were about to. No. Absolutely not." He could already feel his pulse picking up, and he hated it. "Ilya, I play for Montreal. The captain of the Voyageurs can't just stroll into your practice facility at eight in the morning with an armful of tulips. Someone will see. Someone will take a picture. And then someone's going to ask why I'm in Ottawa on my day off hand-delivering flowers with you, and I don't have an answer for that, and Crowell's already made it very clear how he feels about—"
"Is Sunday," said Ilya calmly. "Optional skate. Nobody is there except staff and the rookies, because they are scared of the coach. No reporters. And the staff like me."
"That's not the point."
"Also, we run a foundation together. Everybody knows this. We have meetings, we have fundraisers, we stand next to each other with a very big cheque. You are in Ottawa for the foundation." He shrugged. "Is not even a lie. The flowers, the foundation, it's all charity."
"It's not charity, it's tulips."
"Tulips for women on Women's Day." Ilya spread his hands. "Is not exactly a Pride parade, Shane."
Shane opened his mouth and found he had nothing to put in it. He tried anyway. "It's still—"
"And," Ilya went on, with the air of a man playing his best card, "I cannot carry forty-three bouquets by myself. I need a man with strong arms."
"You have strong arms."
"Yes," Ilya agreed. "But only two."
Shane looked at the trunk, full to bursting with paper and cellophane. He looked at Ilya, who was waiting with an expression of perfect patience and something underneath it that looked a lot like hope, and who had very probably spent every March eighth for the last decade doing this alone.
He got in the car. He spent the whole drive with his heart going too fast, rehearsing the words foundation business under his breath until they stopped sounding like words at all, with an armful of reserves and a lapful of orphans and absolutely no idea what he'd do if anyone asked.
Walking into the Centaurs' building at Ilya's side made the back of Shane's neck prickle the whole way from the parking lot. As far as anyone there knew, they were friends, two old rivals who had somehow ended up running a charity together, and Shane held on to that like a stick in a scrum. At first, nobody asked. The security guard at the staff entrance only grinned and waved them through, and once they were inside, nobody looked at Shane at all. Everyone was looking at the flowers.
Ilya went through that building like a man on a mission. He started at the front desk, where he handed the receptionist a bouquet of red tulips, and she stared at them and then at him and put a hand over her heart.
"Ilya. What's this for?"
"Happy March eighth," he said, as though that explained everything, and kept walking.
Shane trailed along behind with the reserves. He watched the athletic therapist laugh and hug Ilya, and two women from media relations immediately pull out their phones, and in the kitchen an older woman in an apron, who turned out to be Denise, accept a huge yellow bouquet and tell Ilya he was a sweet boy and she'd make him pierogi next week, which made Ilya look so absurdly happy that Shane had to glance away. Somewhere around the equipment room it dawned on him that he was watching something Ilya had done many, many times before.
That was also roughly where Ilya's teammates began to notice. Haas and Young, the two rookies, came around a corner in their workout gear and stopped dead, and for once, it wasn't the flowers that did it. Luca was staring at Shane.
Shane's stomach dropped straight through the floor. This was it. This was exactly what he'd said would happen, standing in the driveway barely an hour ago: someone was going to see him, and wonder, and ask, and he was going to be standing in a hallway in the Centaurs' building with his arms full of tulips and nothing whatsoever to say. His heart was going so hard he could hear it. Beside him, Ilya didn't so much as blink.
"You're—" He stopped, and started again. "Hi. Sorry. You're Shane Hollander."
"Hi," said Shane, about half an octave too high.
"I had your poster. When I was a kid. Not, like, recently." Luca had gone scarlet from the collar up. "What are you—why are you here? In our building? Not that you can't be here. You can be anywhere. I just—"
"Foundation stuff," Shane heard himself say, much too fast, the words he'd been muttering under his breath the whole drive coming out flat and obviously rehearsed. It was even true, technically, in the sense that he was standing next to the other half of the foundation, holding its tulips.
"Oh. Right. Cool." Luca nodded far too many times. "Cool, cool, cool."
It took Shane a full second to understand that Luca wasn't suspicious at all, only starstruck, and the relief hit him so hard his knees went strange. Beside them, Ilya was enjoying this so much that Shane could feel it radiating off him like heat. Young, meanwhile, had not looked at Shane once. He was staring past all of them at the ticketing office, where a woman was arranging a bouquet of white tulips in a water jug, and then at the kitchen doorway, and then at the media coordinator's face.
"Why," he said slowly, "does everybody have flowers?"
"Wait," said Luca, finally tearing his eyes away from Shane. "Is this a thing? Were we supposed to do something?"
"Today is March eighth," said Ilya, without breaking stride.
Luca turned back to Shane, apparently having decided that if Shane Hollander was going to be standing in his hallway, he might as well be useful. Shane shrugged helplessly. Young, who had gone slightly gray, was already counting bouquets under his breath.
"He got flowers for everyone," Young said, in the flat, doomed voice of a man watching a breakaway he couldn't catch. "We're going to look like assholes. Luca. There's a gas station on Bank Street."
They were gone before Ilya had finished handing over the next bouquet. By lunchtime, Harris Drover from the social media team had posted a video of Ilya delivering flowers to every woman on staff, with a close-up of Denise wiping her eyes, and twenty minutes later he posted a second one: Luca and Young slinking into the building with armfuls of gas-station carnations still in their plastic sleeves, price stickers clearly visible. The comments were merciless. Shane watched both videos in the passenger seat on the way back and laughed until he had to put his phone down.

There was one bouquet left, and it was the biggest one of all.
Shane didn't realize where they were going until Ilya pulled up outside his parents' house. They weren't supposed to be there until next weekend. But Ilya parked at the curb as though this had always been the plan and lifted the last bouquet out of the back seat: deep red and pale pink tulips, with a spray of the yellow fluff at the center that turned out, up close, to be clusters of tiny round blossoms like pom-poms. They smelled soft and powdery and sweet, like something from a long time ago.
"What are those?"
"Mimosa." Ilya adjusted the paper around them with great care. "In Moscow, on March eighth, is everywhere. Every metro station, old ladies selling it from buckets. Here is very hard to find. The florist ordered it special."
He counted the stems one last time before he got out of the car.
Shane's mother opened the door before they'd reached the top step, the way she always did, reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a dish towel over one shoulder. "Oh! I didn't know you two were coming—" she began, and then she saw the flowers and stopped.
"Happy March eighth, Yuna," said Ilya, and held them out.
Shane had seen his mother receive a lot of flowers over the years, most of them from him and some of them, apparently, in even numbers. She always said thank you, and she always meant it. He had never seen her look quite like this. She took the bouquet from Ilya carefully, with both hands, and looked down at the mimosa and then up at him, and her eyes had gone very bright.
"Ilya," she said. "These are beautiful."
"Is Women's Day," said Ilya, and then, because the full explanation was apparently reserved for his favorite people, "In Russia, very big holiday. You give flowers to every woman. Mother, teacher, grandmother, everybody. Is to say thank you."
"Thank you for what?"
Ilya shrugged, suddenly awkward. "For everything."
She made a small sound and stepped forward to hug him, flowers and all, and Ilya bent down so she could reach, and Shane stood on the step behind them with his hands shoved in his pockets and his throat unexpectedly tight. His father appeared in the hallway behind them, took one look at the bouquet, and sighed.
"Great," he said. "Now the rest of us look terrible."
"Is easy, David." Ilya straightened up. "You buy flowers on March eighth. Every year."
"Every year?"
"Every year. Odd number."
Shane's father looked to Shane for rescue. Shane just grinned at him.

They stayed for dinner, of course. His mother put the flowers in her best vase in the middle of the table and touched the mimosa every time she walked past it, and she asked Ilya so many questions about Women's Day in Russia that Shane heard more about Ilya's childhood in one evening than he had in the entire previous year: schoolboys bringing flowers to the girls in their class, the stalls outside every metro station, the way the whole city smelled of mimosa for one day in March and then not again until the next.
It was only much later, driving home through dark, quiet streets with snow blowing across the headlights, that Shane asked the question he'd been carrying around since a quarter past six that morning.
"Who did you used to buy them for? In Moscow?"
Ilya didn't answer right away. The streetlights slid over his face one after another, and Shane waited, because he had learned that waiting was usually the only way to get anything true out of him.
"My mother," Ilya said at last. "Every year, since I was small. The first time, I was maybe six. I had coins from somewhere, and I bought one mimosa from an old lady at the metro. One stem, very sad-looking." A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "She put it in a glass on the kitchen table like it was roses."
Shane didn't say anything. He didn't want to interrupt.
"After she died, March eighth was a bad day. For a long time. I still bought mimosa for Svetlana every year, because she would never forgive me if I didn't." The corner of his mouth twitched. "She would also hit me. Then I left Moscow." Ilya's hands shifted on the wheel. "Then in Boston, my first year, I thought, okay. There are women at the rink. They work very hard, nobody says thank you. So I buy for them. Is not the same, but is something. And I kept doing it, and now it is...a thing." He glanced over at Shane, quickly, and back at the road. "And now there is Yuna."
Shane had to look out the side window for a while after that. It was the plainness of it that undid him, the way Ilya could lay out a six-year-old with a fistful of coins and an eighteen-year-old buying tulips for strangers in a country where nobody knew what day it was, and then set Shane's mother down at the end of it all, in the same even voice, as though it were nothing more than the weather.
"She loved them," he said, when he trusted his voice again. "You know that, right? She's going to be talking about those flowers for years."
"Good," said Ilya. "That is the point."

The orphaned tulips were still on the floor on the passenger side when they pulled into the driveway, six of them, a little wilted, stems bent where Shane had been sitting on them. Shane picked them up and turned them over in his hands.
"What do we do with these? We can't give them to anyone. They're...even."
Ilya considered the bundle for a moment. Then he pulled out a single stem and tossed the other five into the snowbank beside the driveway without any ceremony whatsoever, and tucked the last one into the collar of Shane's coat, very carefully, stepping back afterwards to admire the effect.
"It's Women's Day," Shane pointed out.
"So?"
"So I'm not a woman."
"No," Ilya agreed. "But you are very pretty. And one is an odd number. Is allowed."
Shane's face went hot in the freezing air. He opened his mouth and couldn't think of a single thing to say, and Ilya grinned at him, enormously pleased with himself, and went inside to let Anya out.
The tulip lived in a glass on Shane's kitchen table in Montreal for nearly two weeks, far longer than it had any right to. He didn't throw it out until the last petal dropped.
The following year, on March eighth, he set his alarm for five and went with Ilya to the florist.

4.
The Russian store was in a strip mall on the west side of Ottawa, squeezed between a dry cleaner and an eyebrow-threading place, and Shane had driven past it a hundred times without ever registering that it existed. Ilya had found it within a month of moving to the city. By the time Shane was first dragged inside, Ilya was already on first-name terms with the woman at the register, a tiny, fierce person with dyed red hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain, who turned out to be responsible for the orange zigzag socks. Her name was Tamara. She called Ilya Ilyusha and pinched his cheek whenever he came in, and he let her, which Shane found so delightful that he had to pretend to be deeply interested in a shelf of pickled mushrooms.
They were there on a Saturday in July because of the barbecue. Every summer, Zane Boodram threw one at his place for the whole Centaurs roster, a sprawling, loud, all-day affair that Ilya described as the only team-building exercise worth anything, and this year it was Shane's first. He'd signed with Ottawa on the first of July, and it still didn't feel entirely real: the new jersey hanging in his closet, the locker room he hadn't even set foot in yet, a whole roster of guys he'd spent years trying to beat who were now, apparently, his teammates. Bood had dealt with the question of how to welcome him in the most straightforward way possible, by telling Ilya to bring him to the barbecue and to bring a side dish while he was at it. So Shane had made a list. It was a good list, organized by category, with grilled vegetables and marinated chicken for thirty and allowances for two vegetarians and one teammate with a shellfish allergy. He was quietly proud of it. Ilya had read it over, nodded approvingly, and then, once the chicken and the vegetables were safely in the trunk, driven straight past the turn for home, because there were some things, he said, that you could not get at Loblaws.
The store smelled of smoked fish and dill and something sweet and yeasty from the bakery case at the back. Ilya moved through it like a man who'd come home. He picked up a loaf of dark bread and smelled it with his eyes closed; he put three jars of real pickles in the basket, the cloudy kind floating in brine with whole garlic cloves; he got into an argument with Tamara in rapid Russian and was swatted with a rolled-up newspaper for his trouble, and laughed. Shane, meanwhile, was trying to work out the protein content of a box of buckwheat from context clues, which was why he didn't see what happened next. He only heard it: a small sound from Ilya, half gasp and half laugh, a sound Shane had never heard him make before.
He looked up in alarm. Ilya was standing in front of the deli fridge with one hand pressed flat against the glass, like a kid outside a toy store.
"What? What is it?"
"Kholodets," said Ilya reverently.
Shane came over and looked. On the middle shelf sat a row of clear plastic tubs, each one filled with something pale and translucent, a grayish sort of beige, with chunks of meat suspended in it like insects in amber. Some had flecks of carrot. One had what Shane was fairly sure was a whole peppercorn.
"What," he said carefully, "is that?"
"Is meat. Pork, beef. You cook it with the bones for a very long time, many hours, with garlic, and then you let it cool, and it becomes..." Ilya made a wobbling gesture with one hand.
"Jelly," said Shane faintly. "Meat jelly."
"Da!"
Ilya opened the fridge and lifted out one of the tubs and held it up to the light as though it were a jewel. Then he tapped the side of it with one finger, and the whole thing quivered.
Shane took a step back. "Why is it shaking?"
"Is jelly. Jelly shakes."
"Meat shouldn't shake."
But Ilya wasn't really listening. He was still turning the tub slowly in the light, and his grin had gone soft at the edges in a way Shane didn't often see. "I have not had this since..." He stopped to think. "Fifteen years? More. My grandmother made it for New Year. Every year, a big dish on the balcony, because it was too big for the fridge. I would sneak out in my socks and steal pieces with my fingers, and she would yell at me from the kitchen." He laughed quietly. "I think I forgot about it. I didn't know you could buy it here."
Then he took three more tubs out of the fridge and put them in the basket.
Shane stared at the basket. "That's four."
"For barbecue."
"You're going to serve that. To people."
"Is delicious," said Ilya, with total confidence. "Everybody will love."
Shane had a great deal to say about that, but Tamara had come out from behind the register to see what the commotion was, and when she saw the four tubs she clapped her hands in delight, vanished into the back, and came out again with a small jar of fiercely white grated horseradish, which she pressed firmly into Shane's hands along with what was very clearly a set of instructions.
"She says you need horseradish for kholodets," Ilya translated. "Or mustard. Or both. Also she says you are too skinny."
"I'm not skinny. I have a very carefully managed body composition—"
"I will tell her," said Ilya, and didn't.

On the drive home, Shane looked it up on his phone, because he couldn't not.
The results were not what he'd expected. It was mostly collagen, it turned out, which was genuinely good for joints and tendons, and it was essentially bone broth in solid form, high in protein and low in carbohydrates, with a decent amount of glycine, which was supposed to help with sleep. He was halfway through reading all of this out loud before he realized what he was doing, and looked up to find Ilya watching him from the corner of his eye with an expression of enormous smugness.
"No," said Shane. "Don't. It's nutritionally defensible. That's not the same thing as edible."
"Mm."
"I'm not eating it."
"You will," said Ilya, turning onto his street. "Wait and see."

Shane sat in the car for a full minute after Ilya parked outside Bood's house.
It wasn't the barbecue, exactly. It was everything the barbecue meant. This was their first summer out, and the way he'd left Montreal still sat in his stomach like a stone: the meetings behind closed doors, the carefully worded statements, the teammates who'd gone quiet and the ones who'd gone quieter, the feeling of walking out of a building he'd given more than a decade of his life to and not being entirely sure anyone was sorry to see him go. He'd told himself Ottawa would be different. He mostly believed it. But it was one thing to be the new guy on a team, and quite another to walk into the alternate captain's backyard as the captain's fiancé, with every single person there knowing exactly who he was and exactly who he'd come with, and no idea at all what any of them really thought about it.
Beside him, Ilya had turned off the engine and was watching him, one wrist draped over the wheel.
"You are doing the thing," he said.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you think about every possible disaster, in order from worst to also worst." Ilya reached over and unbuckled Shane's seatbelt for him, since Shane apparently wasn't going to do it himself. "They like you already. They just don't know it yet. Also, you brought chicken. Nobody hates a man who brings chicken."
"That's not how people work."
"Is exactly how hockey players work," said Ilya, and got out of the car to let Anya out of the back seat. She shot across the lawn toward Bood's gate as if she'd been personally invited, which, according to Bood, she had. After a moment, Shane took a breath and followed them both.
By nearly every measure, the barbecue was a success.
The weather was perfect, hot and bright, and Bood's backyard, which backed onto a ravine full of trees, was already packed by the time they arrived. For the first twenty minutes Shane hovered at the edge of it all, acutely aware that most of the people in that yard had spent years chirping him from the other bench. Then Bood came over, put a beer in his hand, and told him, loud enough for half the yard to hear, that they'd been waiting on him since the trade rumors started, and that if anybody gave him or Roz a hard time about anything, anything at all, they'd have to go through Bood first. Cassie hugged him like she'd known him for years. Wyatt shook his hand and said, with great sincerity, that he'd always wanted to find out what it was like not to have Shane Hollander shooting at his head. Then Evan Dykstra and Troy Barrett dragged him into an argument about referees in which it turned out they all held identical opinions, and somewhere in the middle of it Shane realized his shoulders had come down from around his ears. After that it was fine. Better than fine. Luca and Wyatt set up a cornhole tournament on the side lawn that became alarmingly competitive, with Lisa Hayes keeping score on a paper plate and refusing all appeals. Cassie Boodram went around making sure everybody had a drink, and little Milo fell asleep in the hammock with a juice box clutched in his fist. Bood ran his grill like a general, but he let Shane take over one end of it for the chicken, which suited Shane fine, because it gave him something to do with his hands and a good excuse to avoid small talk. His chicken came out perfectly, and everything went exactly according to plan.
Then Ilya came out of the house with the kholodets.
He'd turned all four tubs out onto a big white platter and garnished them with sprigs of dill, with Tamara's horseradish on one side and a pot of the fiercest yellow mustard Shane had ever seen on the other, and he carried it across the lawn with both hands like a waiter presenting a birthday cake. With every step, the kholodets wobbled. Conversations died as he passed. By the time he set the platter down in the middle of the picnic table, between the potato salad and Shane's grilled vegetables, half the yard had turned to stare.
There was a long silence.
"Roz," said Bood finally, spatula in hand, staring at the platter as though it had personally insulted his grill. "What the fuck is that. What did you bring into my house."
"Kholodets."
"Is it...dessert?"
"Is meat."
The silence broke into a groan and then a chorus of horror. "Oh no," said Cassie, with feeling. Dykstra asked whether it was supposed to be see-through, in the voice of a man who genuinely needed to know. Haas, who had been reaching for a burger bun, slowly withdrew his hand from the table altogether, as though the platter might bite. Wyatt wandered over from the cornhole game to investigate and leaned in very close, squinting.
"Guys," he announced. "He made meat Jell-O."
"I did not make," said Ilya. "I bought. From Tamara. Is very good."
"There's a carrot in it." Wyatt straightened up with growing conviction. "It's looking at me. Hollander. Hollander, it's looking at me."
Every head swung toward the grill. Shane stood there with the tongs in his hand while Bood demanded to know whether he had ever actually eaten that, and he felt the full weight of the moment: loyalty and love and standing by the man he loved in front of all their friends. He looked at the kholodets. He looked at Ilya, who had one eyebrow raised, waiting to see which way he'd go.
"Absolutely not," said Shane.
Ilya put a hand over his heart. "Traitor."
"I love you. I'm not eating meat Jell-O."
The yard erupted. Bood laughed so hard he had to sit down on the back steps with his spatula across his knees. Lisa took a picture, and then Cassie took one, and then Troy, who hadn't said a single word through any of it, quietly took one too and looked mildly embarrassed about it afterwards. Before long Wyatt had appointed himself official commentator and was announcing to the whole yard every half hour exactly how many brave souls had touched the kholodets so far. The number stayed at zero all afternoon, unless you counted Wyatt himself, who poked it once with a plastic fork and screamed when it wobbled.

None of this bothered Ilya in the slightest.
He cut himself a thick slab, laid it on a slice of Tamara's dark bread, spread an alarming amount of horseradish on top, and sat down at the end of the picnic table to eat it in full view of everyone, with an expression of total contentment. His eyes watered from the horseradish, and he didn't care.
"You guys don't know what you are missing," he informed the table.
"We're missing meat that moves, Roz," said Evan.
"Is your loss. More for me."
The chirping went on all afternoon. Luca wanted to know whether it came in other flavors. Wyatt asked if you could wrestle in it, and Lisa told him absolutely not before anyone else could answer. Bood asked, with what seemed like genuine concern, whether it would still be on his table in the morning or whether it would crawl off in the night and turn up in his garage. Ilya fielded every question with perfect serenity and, when he'd finished his first piece, calmly cut himself another. Watching him from the grill, Shane thought he looked happier than he had all summer.
He had one supporter, in the end. At some point Anya abandoned the burgers and hot dogs altogether and came to sit at his feet, perfectly upright and perfectly still, gazing up at the platter with an expression of total devotion. Ilya broke off a small piece and gave it to her, and she swallowed it whole and went straight back to staring, tail thumping against the grass.
"See," Ilya announced, loud enough for the whole table to hear. "At least someone in this family has taste."
"She eats socks," Shane called from the grill.
"She has good taste."

The guests trickled away as the sun went down, full and sunburned and happy. Bood walked the two of them out to the car himself, carrying the leftover kholodets in its tubs at arm's length, like something that might go off. He asked, with a perfectly straight face, whether Ilya was planning to serve it at the wedding, and Ilya told him yes, obviously, it would be the centerpiece. Shane was fairly sure he was joking. He was not completely sure. Bood only shook his head, clapped Shane on the shoulder and told him welcome to the team, and then informed Ilya that he was welcome back next summer on the strict condition that this never crossed his threshold again.
It was past ten by the time they got home. Shane unloaded the car and put away the leftover chicken and was halfway up the stairs when he noticed that the kitchen light was still on.
Ilya was standing at the counter in the dim glow from the stove hood, eating the last of the kholodets straight out of the tub with a fork. He wasn't on his phone or listening to anything; he was just standing there alone in the quiet with a faraway look on his face that Shane had learned to recognize over the years. It was the look he wore when he was thinking about home.
Shane watched him from the doorway for a moment. Then he came in and sat down on the stool across from him.
"Was it like your grandmother's?"
Ilya thought about it seriously. "No," he said. "Hers was better. More garlic." He took another bite. "But close. Close enough."
Then he held out the fork.
There was a small, trembling piece on the end of it with a dab of horseradish on top, and it looked exactly as unappetizing as it had in the store and on the platter and at every point in between. Shane looked at it for a long moment. He thought about Ilya at the end of the picnic table, perfectly content to eat it alone while thirty people chirped him, and about a little boy in his socks sneaking out onto a freezing Moscow balcony to steal pieces with his fingers.
He took the fork.
It was cold and salty and garlicky and very meaty, all of which was fine. The problem was the texture, which melted and wobbled on his tongue at the same time in a way his brain flatly refused to accept, and then the horseradish hit, and his eyes filled, and he had to press a hand over his mouth. Ilya watched the entire process with great scientific interest.
"Well?"
Shane swallowed and took a moment to recover. "Still disgusting."
Ilya laughed, delighted, and took the fork back. "Da," he said. "But you tried."
"Don't tell anyone."
"I will tell Bood first thing tomorrow."
"Ilya."
Ilya ate the last piece and set the empty tub in the sink, and then he came around the counter and kissed him, and his mouth tasted of horseradish and garlic, and Shane discovered, to his great surprise, that he didn't mind that in the slightest.
He was still never eating it again.

5.
The first time it happened, Shane barely noticed.
It was their first summer at the cottage. They'd been sleeping together for years by then, in hotel rooms in Boston and Montreal and whichever city was hosting the All-Star Game that year, but this was something else: a whole week in the same house, with nowhere to be and no one watching, and it was so new that Shane spent half of every day waiting for it to break. Ilya had driven up on a Thursday, which had felt like a small miracle in itself, and on Friday night Shane made dinner. Grilled salmon, rice, a salad with too many vegetables in it that Ilya complained about and then ate every last bite of. The kitchen table at the cottage was small and square and old, its wooden top scarred by decades of other people's dinners, and when Shane brought the plates over, he sat down at the corner, right next to Ilya's chair, close enough for their knees to touch.
Ilya came back from the fridge with two beers, looked at him, and said, "Not there."
"What?"
"Move." Ilya set the beers down and tugged at the back of Shane's chair, not roughly, just insistently, until Shane got up and went around to the far side of the table. Then Ilya sat down across from him, looking satisfied, and started eating as if nothing had happened.
Shane assumed it was about the view. He was only just beginning to understand, that summer, how much Ilya liked looking at him, and the thought made him flush if he let it go on for too long. Of course it was nicer to sit across from someone than beside them. He didn't give it another thought for months.

The second time was at a steakhouse during an All-Star weekend, in a private back room somebody had booked because it was one of the few places in town where two rival players could have dinner together without ending up in the papers. The table was long and set for four, though it was only the two of them, and Shane sat down at the corner seat nearest the door out of pure habit, because he liked to see who was coming in.
This time Ilya didn't say a word. He walked around the table, put both hands on Shane's shoulders, and steered him two seats down the side. Then he sat down across from him and opened his menu.
Shane stared at him. "What was that?"
"What was what?"
"You moved me."
"Is a better seat," said Ilya, without looking up from the menu. "More comfortable."
It was an identical chair; Shane had been sitting in its twin a second earlier. But the waiter came in before he could say so, and then the steaks arrived, and then Ilya's foot found his under the table and stayed there for the rest of the meal, and Shane forgot to be curious.

By the fourth or fifth time, he'd noticed a pattern. By the tenth, he had theories.
It happened at restaurants. It happened at Ilya's kitchen island, where Ilya would reach over and drag Shane's stool three inches along the counter so it wasn't sitting on the end. It happened at the league awards dinner the year they came out, when Shane sat down at the end of a long banquet table beside Hayden and Ilya leaned across two of his own teammates to swap their place cards around without a word of explanation. It happened at Shane's parents' house, where his mother set his plate at the corner of the kitchen table and Ilya, sitting down beside it, quietly exchanged it for his own and shifted over. Shane's mother noticed that one. She raised her eyebrows at him across the table, and Shane could only shrug, because he had no idea either.
Shane liked a theory. He liked data and patterns and understanding why things worked the way they did, and every time Ilya steered him away from the corner of a table, his brain filed the incident away with the others and turned it over. Maybe Ilya thought corner seats were bad for your posture, except that Ilya's own posture was terrible. Maybe he just liked sitting across from Shane, which didn't explain the kitchen island or the banquet table. Maybe it had something to do with drafts. Ilya had very strong feelings about drafts, and perhaps cold air collected in the corners of rooms, and therefore at the corners of tables. Shane spent a genuinely embarrassing evening reading about airflow patterns in residential kitchens before he admitted to himself that this was insane, even by his standards.
In the end, he decided to test it.

It was at the cottage again, a couple of summers later, at the end of June, in the strange, suspended week before free agency opened, when Shane's whole life was about to change and neither of them wanted to talk about it. Ilya was at the stove making pelmeni and humming something tuneless in Russian, and Shane set the table and then, very deliberately, sat down at the corner of it. Not even pretending. Right on the corner, hands folded neatly in front of him.
Ilya turned around with the pot in his hands, saw him, and stopped humming.
For a long moment they looked at each other. Then Ilya set the pot down on a trivet, walked over without a word, put his hands under Shane's arms, and lifted him bodily out of the chair, as though Shane weighed nothing at all, which he very much did not. He deposited him on the chair on the far side of the table, went back to the stove, and started ladling pelmeni into bowls as if none of it had happened.
"Okay," said Shane, once he had recovered the power of speech. "No. That's it. I need to know."
"Know what?"
"Ilya. You just picked me up."
"You are not so heavy."
"That is not the point."
Ilya brought the bowls over along with a pot of sour cream, set one in front of each of them, and sat down. He picked up his spoon. Then he looked across the table at Shane with a completely straight face.
"If you sit at the corner of the table," he said, "you will not get married for seven years."
There was a pause.
Shane stared at him, and then he started to laugh. He didn't mean to, and he tried very hard not to, but it came bubbling up anyway, and once it started it wouldn't stop, and he had to put his spoon down and press the back of his hand to his mouth while Ilya ate his pelmeni with an air of great patience and waited for him to finish.
"That," Shane managed eventually, "is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."
"Is true."
"It's a superstition."
"Superstitions are true sometimes."
"Name one that's true."
"Wet hair," said Ilya, without missing a beat.
Shane opened his mouth, and then shut it again, because he had no answer to that and they both knew it.
Still grinning, he picked his spoon back up. The pelmeni were very good. And he thought, fondly and a little helplessly, of Ilya steering him out of the corner seat at that All-Star steakhouse, and at the banquet table, and at his mother's kitchen table, over and over for years, never once explaining.
"So all this time," he said, "you've been, what? Protecting my marriage prospects?"
"Da," said Ilya simply, and went back to eating.
Shane laughed again, and then, partway through, stopped.
Because Ilya had said it so easily, as though it were obvious. And Shane's brain, which did math whether he asked it to or not, had already started counting backwards. The first time had been here, at this table, that very first summer, when neither of them had ever said I love you out loud, when coming out had seemed about as likely as flying, when Shane had honestly not known whether they'd still be doing this by the end of the season. And Ilya had been guarding the corner of the table even then.
"Ilya," he said slowly. "That first time. Here. That was...years ago."
Ilya shrugged, eyes on his bowl. "Yes."
"We weren't even—I mean, we didn't know if we'd ever be able to—"
"I know."
"So why—"
"Because I was hoping," said Ilya. He said it to his pelmeni, very matter-of-factly, as if he were talking about the weather. "Seven years is a long time. I did not want to wait seven years. Just in case."
Shane put his spoon down.
There were a hundred things he wanted to say, and none of them would come out in the right order, and his throat had gone too tight to let any of them through. He just sat there across the old scarred table looking at Ilya, who was very carefully not looking back, the tips of his ears going faintly pink, and felt something in his chest crack open and fill up with light.
"What if I wanted to marry someone else?" he said finally, because it was either make a joke or burst into tears over the pelmeni.
Ilya did look up at that. He considered the question with great seriousness.
"Then you are also protected," he said. "Is general coverage. Very good policy. No extra charge."
Shane laughed, and it came out wet, and he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Ilya reached across the table and gently caught the tear he'd missed with his thumb.
"Eat," he said softly. "Is getting cold."

Shane didn't sleep much that night, but it was a good kind of not sleeping.
He lay on his side in the dark with the lake lapping at the dock and the loons calling somewhere out on the water and Ilya breathing slow and even behind him, and he thought about seven years, and how long that was, and how short. They had already spent longer than that hiding. And all that time, without a word, Ilya had been quietly clearing a path for something neither of them had dared to name. It was so exactly like him that it almost hurt: to love someone that fiercely and stubbornly and completely, the way he dried his hair and bought flowers and defended a platter of meat jelly against a whole backyard of hockey players, and never explain himself unless somebody asked and then waited for the answer. He'd been prepared, Shane realized, for Shane never to catch on at all.
Sometime around three, Shane slipped out of bed and went downstairs in the dark. He found a ball of kitchen string in the drawer beside the stove and cut off a piece about six inches long, then crept back upstairs, knelt on his side of the bed, and, holding his breath, looped it around the fourth finger of Ilya's left hand where it lay on top of the covers. Ilya didn't wake. He only sighed and turned his face deeper into the pillow.
Shane marked the string with a pen, folded it very small, and tucked it into his wallet behind his driver's license, where nobody would ever think to look. Then he climbed back into bed, pressed his face into the warm back of Ilya's neck, and finally slept.
He proposed four days later, on the dock at sunset, badly, with a speech he'd rehearsed a dozen times and then forgot completely, and Ilya said yes before he'd even finished the question.
He never sat at the corner of a table again. He wasn't taking any chances.

+1
Ilya woke up on the morning of his wedding at twenty to six, which was, as far as he knew, the earliest he had ever woken up voluntarily in his life.
The cottage was quiet. Shane had spent the night at his parents' place in town, because Yuna had declared that seeing each other before the ceremony was bad luck, and Shane, who claimed not to believe in luck, had packed an overnight bag without a word of argument. So it was only Ilya and Anya, and the lake outside the window slowly turning from gray to silver, and the garden below, where a crew of very efficient people had spent the previous day stringing lights through the trees and setting out tables on the lawn while Ilya did his best to stay out of their way.
He lay there for a while listening to the loons and waiting to feel something enormous. What he mostly felt was hungry. So he got up and made coffee and toast and took Anya down to the dock, and sat with his feet in the cold water while she hunted frogs in the reeds. When they came back up, he had a long shower and then sat on the edge of the bed and dried his hair properly, all the way through, the way he did every morning of his life. It was going to be a hot day, and it didn't matter in the least. Some things you did whether they made sense or not, because someone who loved you had told you to, a long time ago.
Nobody from Moscow was coming. He hadn't invited anyone, and he had made his peace with that a long time ago, or with most of it. Once or twice, while the coffee brewed, he let himself wonder what this morning might have looked like if things had been different. Then he stopped wondering, because they weren't, and because in a few hours he was going to marry Shane Hollander, and there wasn't really room in his chest for anything else.

Yuna arrived at eight with garment bags over her arm, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and the brisk energy of a woman who had made several lists and fully intended to complete every one of them. She set the bags down in the hall, took one look at Ilya standing in the kitchen in his sweatpants, and softened all at once.
"Oh, sweetheart," she said. "How are you?"
It was the question he had been answering truthfully his whole adult life, and he answered it truthfully now.
"Hungry," he said.
Yuna gave him a long look over the top of her glasses, the same look Shane gave him whenever he was being stubborn, and then she came over and hugged him. She smelled of coffee and the lilac soap she always used. "That's nerves, sweetheart," she said into his shoulder. "It means it matters. David threw up twice before ours."
"Really?"
"Don't you dare tell him I told you." She let him go and looked him over with a critical eye. "Now. Have you eaten? You need to eat something, or you'll faint during the vows and Shane will never recover."
He had eaten. She made him eat again anyway.

The ceremony was short. That had been Shane's one firm request, early on, when the idea of standing up in front of other people, even a handful of people who loved them, and saying out loud what they meant to each other still made the color drain out of his face. Ilya, who would have married him at a courthouse on a Tuesday afternoon if that was what it took, had agreed at once.
So it was short: the lake behind them, a garden full of people in front, Hayden at Shane's side holding the rings like live grenades, the officiant saying the things officiants said. Ilya didn't hear most of it. He was looking at Shane, in a dark blue suit, his hair very neat and his eyebrows very serious, exactly as they'd been in a hotel ballroom half a lifetime ago. Shane was trembling slightly, not enough for anyone else to see, and he looked at Ilya the whole time as if there were nothing else there to look at. When it came to his vows, he took a folded sheet of paper out of his inside pocket and then never once glanced at it.
Afterwards, Ilya couldn't remember most of what he'd said. He remembered one line, because Shane's voice cracked right in the middle of it.
"I've never met anyone who tells the truth the way you do," Shane said. "I want to spend my whole life hearing it."
Ilya's own vows were shorter. He had written them in English and thrown them away and written them again, several times, because they were for Shane and Shane needed to understand every word, and English had never once in his life felt big enough for what he was trying to fit into it. In the end they came out a little crooked. He got one of the tenses wrong, and nobody cared. Only at the very end did he let himself slip into Russian, for one short line, one that Shane had learned months ago out of his grammar books and practiced in the car until he finally got the stress in the right place: Ya tebya lyublyu.
Shane understood that one. His face crumpled completely, which made Ilya's eyes sting, which set off Yuna in the front row, which started a chain reaction that eventually reached Wyatt Hayes, who cried harder than anyone.
Then they were married, just like that.

The first thing waiting for them at the garden gate was Tamara.
She was standing very straight in a purple dress and an enormous hat, holding a round loaf of bread on a long embroidered towel. It was golden and glossy and braided around the edges, with a little dish of salt nestled into the top, and Ilya stopped so suddenly that Shane walked right into his back.
It was what parents did. At every wedding he'd been to as a child, it had been the mothers waiting at the door with the bread and salt, to welcome the couple into their new life. He hadn't expected it. He hadn't let himself expect it. Tamara took one look at his face and her own softened, just slightly, before she recovered herself and informed him briskly, in Russian, that somebody had to do this properly and it clearly wasn't going to be him.
"What is it?" Shane murmured.
"Karavai." Ilya's voice came out rough, and he had to clear his throat. "Bread and salt, to welcome. Now we each take a bite, and whoever takes the bigger bite is head of the house."
He should have known better than to explain the rules first. Shane's eyes narrowed with exactly the same focus Ilya had watched him bring to a thousand faceoffs, and before Ilya could even lean in, Shane had taken a bite so enormous and so undignified that Tamara barked with laughter and the guests crowding the path behind them broke into applause.
"That is cheating," said Ilya.
"You told me the rules," said Shane, with his mouth full, looking unbearably pleased with himself.
Ilya took his own bite, a perfectly respectable one, and conceded the house with as much grace as he could manage, which was not very much.

It took Ilya about a minute and a half in the garden to notice the tables.
They were round. Every single one of them: six round tables with white cloths and low bowls of flowers in the middle, not a banquet table anywhere, not a single corner anywhere in the garden. He stopped just inside the entrance and turned slowly on the spot, taking it all in. Then he looked at Shane, who had become very busy straightening his cuff.
"Round tables," said Ilya.
"They're very popular for weddings," said Shane, still not looking up. "The planner said they're good for conversation."
"All of them."
"Every single one." Shane finally met his eyes, his face perfectly straight except for the laughter in them. "I wasn't going to take any chances. Some of these guys are still single."
Ilya laughed loud enough to turn heads, grabbed Shane by his very nice lapels, and kissed him right there on the lawn, and somebody whistled, and somebody else yelled at them to save it for later.

It was a small wedding, on purpose, and it was full of people Ilya loved, which still took him by surprise.
He saw them in pieces as the afternoon went on. Bood had commandeered the speaker within ten minutes and was arguing with the caterers about the playlist, while Cassie pretended not to know him. Lisa Hayes was straightening Wyatt's tie for the third time; it was never going to sit right, and they both knew it. Luca had got into a heated debate with Hayden and J.J., who'd driven down from Montreal that morning, about whether the Voyageurs' new third line was any good, and Troy Barrett stood a little back from all of it with Anya leaning against his legs and Harris Drover at his side, narrating the whole party into his ear in a running commentary that had Troy looking, for Troy, almost relaxed. David had been wrestled into a bow tie that Yuna had very clearly chosen. And Tamara, finished with the bread and salt, produced a covered dish from somewhere and pressed it into Ilya's hands with a very meaningful look. He lifted the lid, saw the kholodets trembling inside, and nearly cried for the second time that day. Bood saw it too, went visibly pale, and kept a very deliberate distance for the rest of the evening.

Dinner came out, and the speeches followed, embarrassing in all the ways that wedding speeches are supposed to be. Hayden told the story of the hairdryer. Bood told the story of the kholodets, at length and with gestures. Then Yuna stood up and talked about the first time Ilya had turned up on her doorstep with an armful of tulips and mimosa, and how she had known in that moment that her son was going to be all right, and the whole garden went quiet.
Ilya was still recovering from that one, pressing the heel of his hand into one eye and pretending it was allergies, when the clinking began.
He knew about this. It was a Canadian thing, or maybe a North American one: somebody tapped a fork against a glass, then everybody did, and the couple was obliged to kiss. Shane had warned him about it weeks ago, with the expression of a man describing an upcoming medical procedure. So when the first fork struck the first glass somewhere near the back, Ilya only sighed good-naturedly and began to turn toward his husband.
But the clinking stopped almost as soon as it had started, and there was an odd, shuffling pause, the kind of silence a crowd makes when it's waiting for something. Then J.J. climbed up onto his chair, wobbling dangerously, cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed at the top of his lungs:
"GORKO!"
Ilya froze.
For half a second nobody moved. Then Bood was on his feet before J.J. had even finished the second syllable, pounding the table with his fist, and after that there was no stopping it. Forty-odd people turned out to be more than enough. They all shouted it together, joyfully and badly and in an astonishing variety of pronunciations: Lisa and Cassie with their hands cupped around their mouths, David banging his fork against his plate in time, even Troy, very quietly, mouthing along.
"GORKO! GORKO! GORKO!"
Ilya had heard that chant before, and his body recognized it before his mind could catch up. He'd heard it at every wedding of his childhood, crammed into the back rooms of Moscow restaurants with his cousins, too young to understand why the grown-ups kept shouting that the wine was bitter. He'd watched couples kiss to it while the whole room counted out loud. Not once in his life had he imagined that anyone would shout it for him.
He turned to Shane. Shane was already watching him, pink to the tips of his ears and biting his lip, half terrified and half enormously pleased with himself.
"What," said Ilya, and his voice wasn't working properly, "did you do."
"I read about Russian weddings," said Shane, a little too fast. "There was this thing where everyone shouts that the drinks are bitter, and the couple has to kiss to make them sweet again, and I thought—I thought you should have something. Something from home." He swallowed. "So I asked Tamara how to say it properly, and then I just...told everyone."
Ilya stared at him. "You told everyone."
"It's one word, Ilya. It's not hard." Shane glanced toward the bar, where J.J. was still shouting it with total commitment and a truly creative vowel. "Well. It's not hard for most people. J.J.'s been saying it like gorgonzola all afternoon."
Ilya opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Around them the chant was getting louder and more ragged, J.J. getting the vowel wrong again somewhere near the bar, and underneath all of it Ilya could hear Tamara, sharp and unmistakably Russian, holding the whole wobbly thing together like a metronome. It was terrible. It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. He realized he was crying, openly, in front of everyone, and found that he did not care in the slightest.
"Your pronunciation is terrible," he told Shane.
"I know." Shane was smiling now, a little shaky, hopeful. "Is it okay?"
"Is perfect."
Then he took Shane by the collar and kissed him.
The garden roared. And Tamara, who knew exactly what came next, rose to her feet and began to count at the top of her lungs.
"Raz! Dva! Tri!"
The rest of the garden caught on at four, switched to English, and kept going. Ilya didn't stop, and neither did Shane: Shane, who had spent so many years terrified of being seen, of being caught looking a second too long, held on to Ilya's jacket with both fists while everyone they loved counted out loud. Somebody was banging on a table. Hayden was yelling something that might have been get a room. Shane was laughing into Ilya's mouth and Ilya was laughing back, and technically speaking it was a terrible kiss, all teeth and smiling, and it was the best one of his life.
They came apart at thirty-seven, and the whole garden exploded.

Much later, when Bood's playlist had finally run out and the last of the guests had been poured into cars and cabs, and the lights strung through the garden trees glowed gold against the dark, Ilya found Shane down on the dock.
He was sitting at the very end with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up and his feet dangling over the water, Anya asleep beside him with her head on his thigh. Ilya sat down on his other side, close enough that their shoulders pressed together, and for a long while neither of them said anything.
"I wasn't sure if it would be too much," Shane said eventually.
"It was not too much."
"I just wanted..." Shane stopped, and started again, the way he did when something mattered too much to get wrong. "You never talk about it. All the stuff you don't get to have. Your family not being here, or anyone from home. And I know I can't fix that. I know. But I thought, if there could be one thing today that sounded like home to you, even for a minute..."
He trailed off. Ilya didn't answer right away. He looked out at the black water and the stars trembling in it, and the string lights glowing in the garden behind them, and thought about a crowded back room in Moscow a long time ago, and a room full of shouting grown-ups, and a small boy who had never imagined any of it would be for him.
"It did," he said at last. "It sounded like home."
Shane let out a long, slow breath. Ilya felt it more than he heard it, in the shoulder pressed against his own.
"Even with J.J. saying gorgonzola?"
"Especially with J.J."
Shane laughed and leaned his head against Ilya's shoulder, and they stayed like that until the loons started calling again out on the lake.

Yuna found him on his way back up to the house. She and David were the last to leave. David had gone to warm up the car, and she was standing on the porch in a borrowed cardigan with her shoes dangling from one hand, looking out over the garden, where the lights were still glowing in the trees. She smiled when she saw him.
"You never answered me properly this morning."
"Which question?"
"You know which question." She tilted her head. "How are you, sweetheart?"
He had been asked that ten thousand times on this continent. He'd answered it in grocery stores and pharmacies, in locker rooms and hallways, in hotel rooms with the curtains drawn, one word at a time and very nearly always true. Most of the time, the one word was all anyone wanted. With the right person, it had only ever been the beginning.
He looked back down the lawn toward the dock, where Shane was coming up the path in the dark with Anya at his heels, his jacket slung over one shoulder and his tie undone.
"Happy," he said.
For once, it was the whole answer.